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Monday, August 22, 2016

Bill Mitchell — Modern Monetary Theory – what is new about it?

A big one from Bill. Hopefully they'll posted the video after the conference.

In a few weeks I am off to the US to present a keynote talk at the – International Post Keynesian Conference – which will be held at the University of Missouri – Kansas City between September 15-18, 2016. I will also be giving some additional talks in Kansas City during that week if you are around and interested. The keynote presentation is scheduled for Friday, September 16 at 17:00. The topic of my keynote presentation will ‘What is new about MMT?’ and will challenge several critics from both the neo-liberal mainstream and from within the Post Keynesian family that, indeed, there is nothing new about MMT – they knew it all along! Well the truth of it is that these characters clearly didn’t previously know or understand a lot of key insights that MMT now offers. No matter how hard they try to reinvent what they knew, the facts are obvious. MMT makes some novel contributions to our knowledge base and shows why a lot of so-called mainstream macroeconomic theory that parades as ‘knowledge’ is, in fact, non-knowledge. This blog and the second-part will provide some notes on the paper I am writing (with my colleague Martin Watts) on this topic.

I've got a good post to put out about anarch-capitalists and the different types of libertarianism. It's a podcast put together people who call themselves anarchists, or left leaning libertarians.

I very much agree with them when they say that the protestant work ethic is BS, but I quite like big government. I was brought up with the NHS, public transport, government run schools, the fire brigade, the welfare state, the towns run by local councils, etc, and I'm quite fond of it.

I was brought up with the NHS, public transport, government run schools, the fire brigade, the welfare state, etc, and I'm quite fond of it.

Right. What the neoliberal right denounces as "big government" is what the libertarian left calls calls "socialism." It's workers working for the people (mostly other working families) rather than for firm owners' profit.

Im not sure Id even put it that way Schofield. Nature seeks nothing. Not balance, not equilibrium, not love. Things that are alive have within them (in their DNA) the capacity to withstand a certain degree of change and continue on but we do have a range of adaptation, we wont adapt to an underwater environment or one where it is 145 degrees all the time. Our DNA is plastic because we are not in a static world and it had to be that way. A static blueprint would have never made it to "us", but "us" wasn't a goal. We are a step along the way to somewhere undetermined and undeterminable.

You can't say Nature seeks nothing. It seeks to persist. For this it needs novelty to adapt to change but it it also needs to stabilize those changes arising from novelty. That stabilization in turn usually resists competitive novelty that is destructive of the ability to persist. This is why it's possible for us as human beings to say that Nature seeks balance. This is the basis of the Extended Hologenome idea now emerging in biological thinking in that considerably more than what we consider the " intrinsic self" helps us to achieve a homeostasis or balance but one that is always in a dynamic state.

I might not put out the podcast because I didn't like the fuller version of it when I listened to it yesterday. The short 45 minute version was sort of interesting, but in the longer version they sounded like old fashioned European revolutionary lefties. Yes, people with an extreme individualistic ideology.

I might be on the left but I'm not up for anything too radical. I would just like to see a left leaning society rather than a right leaning society. And with the power of the ruling class far more limited. Hopefully, that's possible.